Neuerscheinungen

Von Philipp Zehmisch ist eine neue Veröffentlichung mit dem Titel "The Conservation of Anarchy: Ethnographic Reflections on Forest Policies and Resource Use" als Buchkapitel in Energies Beyond the State: Anarchist Political Ecology and the Liberation of Nature erschienen. Das Buch wurde von Jennifer Mateer, Simon Springer, Martin Locret-Collet und Maleea Acker herausgegeben. Das Kapitel ist Teil der Trilogie „Anarchist Political Ecology“.

Hans Harder, Leiter der Abteilung Neusprachliche Südasienstudien, hat bei Routledge einen Sammelband zum Thema „Literary Sentiments in the Vernacular: Gender and Genre in Modern South Asia“ mitherausgegeben. Das Buch ist ein Ergebnis einer Reihe von Workshops, die er in den letzten Jahren gemeinsam mit Shobna Nijhawan (York University, Toronto), Charu Gupta (Delhi University) und Laura Brueck (Northwestern University, Evanston) organisiert hat.

Dr. Philipp Zehmisch, wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter der Ethnologie Abteilung, haben kürzlich einen Artikel in der Zeitschrift Modern Asian Studies (Vol. 56, spezielle Ausgabe No. 5) veröffentlicht. Der Artikel "Can migrants be indigenous? Affirmative action, space, and belonging in the Andaman Islands" ist hier online verfügbar.

Abstract:

In India, the contested category of Scheduled Tribes (STs) is enacted in order to socially uplift certain indigenous communities. This article concentrates on analysing the intersection between modes of indigenous self-definition, political assertion, and localized conceptualizations of space and belonging. My ethnographic example from the Andaman Islands focuses on the Ranchis, aboriginal labour migrants from the Chotanagpur plateau in central India. Being classified as STs, both in their homelands and other localities to which they migrated, Ranchi activists seek to accomplish coeval recognition in the Andamans. Their demands to be rewarded for the labourers’ contribution to the islands’ development are complicated by their occupation of non-ancestral lands that were originally inhabited by indigenous hunter-gatherer communities. By narrowing the notion of indigeneity, and hence ST status, down to communities who live on ancestral lands and who are culturally, socially, and economically different to migrant communities, state authorities and activists reject the Ranchis’ demands for affirmative action as Adivasis from but not of the Andamans. Reflecting on the existential relationship between land and people in popular understandings of indigenousness, this article aims to investigate the Ranchis’ claims of being migrants, yet also indigenous, in order to explore alternative possibilities to think through the notion of indigeneity. In so doing, I focus on the Ranchis’ subaltern history of racialized labour migration, their lack of voice within the post-colonial welfare regime, and their striving for autonomy and autarky by applying principles of indigenous knowledge and cosmologies from their homelands to the Andamans.v

Dr. Philipp Zehmisch,wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter der Ethnologie Abteilung, haben kürzlich einen Artikel in der Revista de Antropologia y Sociologia: Virajes (Vol. 24, Issue No. 2) veröffentlicht. Der Artikel "Bringing Subalterns into Speech? Investigating Anarchic Resistance to Hegemonic Modernity" ist hier online verfügbar.

Abstract:

This article aims to critically examine Gayatri Spivak’s (1992) demand to undo subalternity by inserting subalterns into the circuit of hegemonic modernity. For Spivak, working for the subaltern does not demand speaking for them, rather it entails facilitating their speech acts. From the perspective of an anthropology of anarchy, the opening up of political communication towards inclusion of subaltern speech is, on the one hand, an essential goal. It is congruent with the basic democratic principles of consensual decision-making among social groups living outside or at the margins of state influence. On the other hand, the insistence on including subalterns into hegemony entails an inherent paradox: many subalterns, who resort to anarchic ways of life, escape from the state and its communicational structures as a cultural and political survival strategy. My ethnographic example from the Andaman Islands in India addresses this tension. I focus on the subaltern history and resistance practices of the so-called Ranchis, Adivasis (first settlers, Indigenous Peoples) from the Central Indian hill region, who migrated to the Andamans as contract labourers and settled in marginal forests. The Ranchis’ evasion from the state into the margins, enabled by subsistence practices, presents an alternative to Spivak’s compelling demand to bring subalterns into speech: an inclusion of the Ranchis into the circuits of hegemony would moderately benefit them in terms of getting access to the state and the economy, but, at the same time, it would also imply a loss of their partial autarky, as well as cultural and socio-political autonomy from the outside world.